:laughs in Australian:

Okay:

In 1948, just after WWII, the UK decided to carve a chunk out of Palestine and create a new state there, called Israel - as a Jewish homeland that would take all the refugees that the rest of Europe didn’t want to deal with.

Palestine was not happy about this - the land was taken without their consent, a great chunk of their country just taken from them by decree, backed up by a still highly militarized Europe.

Over the following decades, Palestine tried several times to take their country back, and each time got slapped down (since Israel had vast backing from UK/USA/Europe, both from postwar guilt and because Israel had a lot of strategic value as a platform from which to project military power in the middle east).

Cut to today, and Israel has expanded to take virtually the entire area, apart from some tiny scattered patches of land, and the Gaza strip - a strip of land 40km by 10km, containing most of the Palestinian population, blockaded by sea and land by the Israeli military.

Israel also runs an apartheid regime very similar to the old South African one - Palestinians have very few human or civil rights, generally get no protection from the Israeli police or military, while being treated as hostile outsiders that can be assaulted or have their land ‘settled’ at will by Israelis.

It has been decades since Palestine has had any kind of organised military, and it’s also not recognised as its own country by most of the world, so there’s virtually no way for it to push back, or to call on assistance.

In a situation like that, the only recourse is guerilla warfare, which often descends into (and is exploited by bad actors as) terrorist attacks. It’s a damn good way to farm martyrs, and this hugely serves Israel’s ends, since it can keep pointing to terrorim as justification for their ongoing oppression. Israel in fact provided a great deal of ongoing funding for Hamas, while blocking more moderate groups.

Back in October, a small organised group raided across the border from Gaza into Israel, killing about 1200 people and taking a couple of hundred hostages.

In response, Israel has killed over 40,000 Palestinans in Gaza - mainly women and children - systematically destroying the city’s infrastructure, water, power, food production and distribution, hospitals, universities and schools, bombing refugee camps and destroying the majority of all housing and shelter in the area. It’s also bombing humanitarian aid convoys, preventing food and medicine from reaching the people there. The death toll is expected to reach many hundreds of thousands, since people are already starving and there is no medical care available.

The rest of the world is wringing their hands about the ‘regrettable’ loss of life, while continuing to sell Israel all the weapons and bombs it needs to continue the genocide.

Fuck Israel.

NVIDIA RIVA 128

being alive

Yes, yes she is.

Someone once described her as machine girl’s furry alt account :D

Good lord, speak plainly.

That’s more of a swingers thing than a poly thing.

In the vast majority of poly relationships, people are in separate relationships with each of their partners.

Triads (and quads, etc) are hard-mode. They certainly exist, but they take skill and effort from everyone involved, and so are significantly more rare. And of those, probably only a minority are going to be into the whole group-sex thing in the first place so… not very often.

I spent about 20 years getting stuck in the past while the culture got away from me; I just hadn’t got into any bands since the early 2000s, and it was getting pretty sad.

I also have pretty bad ADHD - music fucks up my ability to concentrate on language-based tasks, so I can’t just play stuff in the background while I do something else - and sitting there staring through multiple songs in a row just isn’t going to happen.

So I had a great idea: turn it into a game.

I nuked my youtube data completely, started again from scratch, and set out, not so much to discover new music, but to train the algorithm to fetch me cool stuff. How well can I nudge the thing into a model of stuff I tend to like?

• Open the home feed, and start going through it
• Reaction videos, influencers, other garbage, hit don’t recommend channel.
• Any music videos, open in new tab
• Rinse and repeat until I have a ridiculous number of tabs open
• Go through each tab:
• Skip through representative chunks of song, get at least 20 seconds of music in before making a decision
• If you just don’t like it, close the tab and move on.
• If you do like it:
• If it’s not posted by the original artist account, go find the original instead if possible.
• Hit like
• Save to playlists for whatever genres it seems to fit, plus a catch-all list (set public, for reasons I’ll explain)
• Open a few new tabs off the sidebar
• If you find three solid bangers from one artist, subscribe.
• When you run out of tabs, refresh the home feed.

It’s adjustable to suit my attention span at the time - if I need the dopamine I just skim more, if I want to chill I let it play longer.

It fits into spare minutes of downtime at work etc.

I have discovered SO MUCH amazing new music, and my tastes have expanded in all kinds of directions. I’ve started not only recognizing but actually having opinions on bands I see on posters as I walk down the street, which is just plain ridiculous for me.

I have gone down some weird and amazing rabbit holes, from Armenian music to Femtanyl.

Probably the best thing I’ve ever done, srsly.

Sometimes the algorithm can get stale, and you end up with a streak of bland, safe stuff that all seems the same.

When this happens, find one of the many third-party playlist-shuffle sites (because the built-in shuffle is still horribly broken), and feed it either your main playlist or some of the genre-specific ones you feel aren’t getting enough love, and listen through a bunch of songs there to dredge up the silt. (you may need to open them in separate tabs; the embed doesn’t always update your watch history properly). And this is why the lists need to be public, so third-party sites can browse your playlists.

Who says you need punishment at all?

The vast majority of misbehaviour is down to poorly-developed coping skills. Which kids have, because, y’know, they’re kids.

We all do stupid shit we know we shouldn’t, even when we know it will lead to bad outcomes for us, because fuck it.

Work is stressful, fuck it entire pizza for lunch. I’m sad and lonely, fuck it I’m calling my ex. I have a shitty headache, fuck it imma chew this stupid customer out. Omg I need to know what happens, fuck it I’m binging the rest of this series at 1am on a work night. Partyyyyyyyy fuck it lets finish the entire bottle. And so on, and so forth.

Emotion management and impulse control is a learned skill, especially when you have to integrate it with all the social stuff. People have decades of experience, and they still fuck up.

What the flying fuck do you expect from a little kid? They’re hilariously incompetent at literally everything; why do you imagine that they’d be automatically perfect at probably the most difficult complex and nuanced skillset there is? They need strategies for dealing, they need experience recognising that they need to deal, and they need time to develop enough emotional resources to take the strain.

And since when did anyone get better at learning any skill when every slipup leads to some asshole deliberately inflicting pain and/or misery on them?

That’s not how you draw a dog, Emily. :thud: You made me do that.

You missed the ball, Billy. Now you don’t get fed.

No, Kate, 5 x 8 is not 42, now I’m going to throw out all your toys.

It doesn’t work like that. People need to learn from their mistakes just as much as from their successes - which means a safe environment with support and feedback, not anxiety, fear, pain and shame.

When my kid was about 6, he had the worst time with video games. He would get frustrated when he lost, frustration would make him worse at the game, he’d start losing more and more, get even more frustrated and he’d spiral into a meltdown and storm off in rage and floods of tears and be absolutely miserable for ages.

Getting angry and melting down because you lost at a video game is entirely unacceptable behaviour, but just heaping more misery on him for doing it would have been not only highly counterproductive but a complete dick move as well.

So instead of doing that, I taught him how to manage the emotion - how to recognise the feeling of frustration, how to recognise when it was building up past his ability to handle, and then to step back and take a break until he was out of the red zone before getting back to it. It took trial and error and a whole bunch of practice, but by god it worked.

Once he got the hang of managing it, not only did the meltdowns stop, but the breaks got shorter and rarer as he smoothed out the curve and got to practice increasing his tolerance without catastrophic failure blowing the whole thing up. Before long he was actively seeking out the most ridiculous rage-games like Super Meat Boy and VVVVVV just to revel in it (and beating the shit out of me at them too, little tyke).

And this principle generalises across the board. Teach them to manage the gigantic emotions and impulses that assail them from all sides. Give them a strategy for dealing with them - and when something gets past them, acknowledge the failure, make restitution if necessary, then postmortem what went wrong and how to handle it better next time. They may not like the process, but that’s worlds away from deliberately inflicting shit on them for the sake of it.

They absolutely do need the feedback, you can’t just give blanket approval to everything and expect results - you just keep it constructive. It’s that simple. Unconditional love and they need to do better than that what the fuck little dude.

And when they’re too little to reason about stuff, that’s what the Parent Voice and judicious use of Death Glare is for. You don’t need to yell, you just go full Mufasa on them as necessary. There’s a couple of cheap tricks you can use to de-escalate threenager tantrums, mostly by interrupting the self-talk loop.

And it works. My kid got all the way through the school system without ever getting in any kind of trouble; I don’t think I needed to even tell him off about anything past the age of 10 or so. We have a great relationship, I never had to be a dickhole to my kid, and I never relied on intimidation to maintain authority through his childhood, it just naturally tapered off into mutual cooperation as he got older.

Knowledge is justified true belief.

You can’t know whether you have it or not.

When my kid started out using the internet, it was over-the-shoulder supervision to start out, then slowly dropping to in-the-room supervision (the PC in the living room), and progressively less over time, with the clearly stated proviso that I would occasionally be glancing over history just to make sure he wasn’t getting caught up in anything horrible, but that I wouldn’t be going into any kind of detail. At 13, he got his own PC in his room, and I left him to it.

I’m a very firm believer that you don’t attempt technical solutions to administrative problems. Privacy is important and monitoring is shit. You equip your kid with the tools and the supervised-experience to make good decisions, and once they can balance by themselves you let go of the bike.

Teach them to do dangerous things safely, that’s parenting in a nutshell.

(actually to clear up a misconception: to teach a kid to ride a bike, you hold the shoulders, not the bicycle. With the extra feedback they can actually compensate and learn to balance; if you hold the bike itself it just weirdly fights them and their cerebellum never gets it)

bash

My brother in christ, you need some Hatchie.

Hatchie - Rooftops

Hatchie - Giving the World Away

It’s true. Badminton players will never ever get laid.

yay more plastic we didn’t have enough

Hell yeah, though I prefer untoasted multigrain - also some cracked black pepper, maybe a little parsley or chives.

the military-sartorial complex

World’s on fire, grab some marshmallows and a stick.

World wants to make you miserable, be happy out of sheer spite.

Listen to more ska: yeah we’re going to hell, but I have a trumpet.

I find that when food just isn’t working to abate hunger, what I actually need is salt.

Couple of fingers of jalapeno brine, the relief is incredible.

Most useful thing was actually a $2 key wallet. Stupid, but it was actually really hard to find the most basic keyring-with-wrap that wasn’t trying to be a card wallet or have fancy dangly bits or whatever. Just an oblong of fake leather, two studs and a split ring, so my keys don’t chew holes in my pocket.

I am all about keeping it sustainable; nobody has willpower longterm. Any fool can come up with a diet of rabbit food and have amazing results for a month before their brain goes postal on them and they start inhaling cheeseburgers nonstop. Trust me, I totally get that. We always attribute vast reserves of motivation and discipline to ourselves that we just don’t have, and the results aren’t pretty.

But on the other side of the coin, your brain can get stuck in a short-term reward loop, and it howls blue murder when you first try to break out of it.

I’m an stress-eater and a boredom-eater, and if the loop gets out of control, not constantly snacking becomes stressful in and of itself, and yeah that’s a complete trainwreck.

But what I’ve found is that after a surprisingly short time of acclimating yourself to controlled amounts of hunger, you can break that loop. Your brain re-learns the difference between not-full and actually-need-calories, and only sees the latter as a problem.

What started out feeling like a catastrophe that you had to white-knuckle through just turns into a boring fact that takes little to no willpower at all to put up with at all.

It’s a really good investment of effort, and makes the whole process a lot easier.